Backlog of regs feared in new Obama term

The widely held belief that President Barack Obama has a backlog of environmental regulations ready to push forward after winning a fresh term in the November election probably helps explain his low popularity ratings in the countryside.

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By Candace Krebs

LA Junta Tribune - La Junta, CO

By Candace Krebs

Posted Nov. 19, 2012 at 10:07 AM
Updated Nov 19, 2012 at 10:15 AM

By Candace Krebs

Posted Nov. 19, 2012 at 10:07 AM
Updated Nov 19, 2012 at 10:15 AM

STILLWATER, Okla. — The widely held belief that President Barack Obama has a backlog of environmental regulations ready to push forward after winning a fresh term in the November election probably helps explain his low popularity ratings in the countryside. Despite his reelection victory, the president’s share of the rural vote dropped from 46 percent in 2008 to 41 percent in the 2012 election, according to the Center for Rural Strategies, a nonprofit organization that advocates for rural communities.

Josh Svaty, a regional senior advisor for the Environmental Protection Agency and a fifth generation farmer from Ellsworth, Kan., would like to put those fears to rest.

“The idea that we have a closet full of regulations ready to go is simply not the case,” he said. “That’s just not how the process works.”

“The timeline on regulations is exceptionally long,” he adds. “Many of the things to come out of EPA in the last four years were put in place long before the current administration and reflect the inevitable march of environmental protection that’s been going on for many years.”

In defending EPA to farmers, Svaty has taken on a challenging job, and he’ll be the first to admit it.

Likewise, it’s a challenge for Terry Detrick, a former president of the National Association of Wheat Growers and current president of American Farmers and Ranchers based in Oklahoma City, to summarize the litany of complaints farmers have about recent environmental policy. But he’s willing to give it a shot: there’s the proposed regulation of ever smaller bodies of water, new requirements to build berms to contain on-farm oil spills, more restrictions on dust, a rumored “cow tax” on bovine methane emissions, failure to approve the XL pipeline connecting Canadian oil fields with refineries in the southern U.S. and regulations that hinder the oil and gas industry vital to rural economies stretching from Texas and Oklahoma northwest to Wyoming, just to name a few.

The bottom line of it all can be summarized, Detrick said, by studying the price of nitrogen fertilizer. Natural gas typically represents 90 percent of the cost of nitrogen. Why, since natural gas prices have plummeted, are fertilizer prices still surging higher? As Detrick researched the subject, he learned that no new nitrogen fertilizer plants have been built in the U.S. since 1970, due in large part to environmental restrictions. That infrastructure is being built instead in countries like China, and U.S. farmers are paying the price in higher input costs.

“While we have been concentrating on weaning ourselves off of foreign oil, we have allowed our fertilizer industry to be exported,” Detrick said bluntly. “We could be totally self-sufficient in food production, but we can’t produce anything without nitrogen.”

Page 2 of 2 - Settling the dust

For his part, Svaty would like to see the dust settle — no pun intended — on many of the public relations dustups that stirred up the farm constituency during President Obama’s first term. It’s a tall order that has put him in front of unfriendly audiences on numerous occasions, including earlier this year when controversy erupted over the use of aerial surveillance to monitor feedyards in Nebraska and Iowa.

Svaty attributes many of the concerns to misunderstandings and false rumors. He defends the feedyard flyovers, for example, as a way to reduce on-the-ground inspections that are time-consuming and unpopular while reducing operating costs for the agency. “We’ve been using it as a screening tool,” he said, emphasizing that it is done by people with cameras in small planes rather than unmanned drones, as was reported by some news outlets. No enforcement actions were taken without on-site inspections, he added.

He also said farm ponds are “nowhere near the definition” of waters subject to oversight by the federal agency (though he also notes this is particularly true in arid climates like the High Plains). The air quality review that stirred up the dust debate was part of a routine reassessment mandated to occur every five years, he added.

Tensions between agriculture and the EPA aren’t likely to dissipate anytime soon. In a new dispute, the EPA recently made headlines for threatening to take over clean water oversight in Iowa from the state’s Department of Natural Resources.

Svaty, who served as the youngest Kansas Secretary of Agriculture ever nominated for the post, took on what is surely one of the government’s toughest outreach missions. So why do it? Svaty seems skeptical the agency and farmers were ever really as far apart on issues as popular opinion seems to indicate. Despite all the talk he heard in the countryside about onerous regulation, his farmer interaction with EPA had been quite minimal, he said.

“I wanted to work in the federal agency and find out how things really work,” he said. He also had an interest in serving under region director Karl Brooks, a well-regarded environmental law expert. (The two are in region 7, which covers Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri.)

With two years under his belt, it’s not clear whether Svaty can actually sway the agency’s culture or direction or how long he will continue in the job. But just by being in the role, Svaty has made the agency feel more accessible.

“EPA has a very different culture than the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has more grassroots involvement,” said Larry Sanders, a longtime agricultural economist at Oklahoma State University who serves on a national EPA advisory committee. “But they are very much willing to listen and interested in getting out in the field and rubbing shoulders with the farm community.”